Have you ever started a match, carrying a popular or sought-after sprite, only to be followed off the jump, deleted, and that sprite lost to a sweaty mess? I have, a great many times. But whilst that isn't directly related to the feature, it demonstrates that the game has a problem. It fosters some not-so-nice behaviours in its players. And these behaviours extend out to the concept of trading and indexing.

Now, Fornite itself doesn't have any sort of trading system, but as a community one has somewhat developed outside the game. Users will organise themselves, share their Epic usernames and attempt to jump into a game to make a trade (or an index, which is a special variation of a trade where the same Sprite is returned to the person who shared it originally). This trades might go just fine, but quite often, one of the parties has other ideas - they steal the sprite leaving the other party footing the bill, and the bad experience.

Sprites have been in Fortnite for a while. It wasn't until Chapter 7 Season 3 did they become a new core game mechanic, becoming instantly popular (or very unpopular, depending on who you ask!). My wife and I play the game daily, and we had resorted to use various apps, from simple notes, to eventually using an AI agent to keep track of everything. We did this because the Sprite feature of the game isn't very useful - you can view those Sprites outside of a match, but during a game, you have to remember what you had, what you need, etc. So there was a need here, I wanted something that could sit on my phone and be my local checklist - and given the volume of sprites not being added into the game, all my other approaches were becoming quickly unmanageable.

So it was fairly late in the season when I felt the challenge to build an app myself. Initially as a simple checklist, but it also occurred other be that one major issue it is hard to support, is the notion of trading within the game, and how that impacts your experience. Having suffered at the hands of nefarious players who lied when doing a trade, killed me and stole my sprites etc, I felt what was missing from this whole experience is that safe, guided trading system - which became one of the core pillars of the app.

This is really simple. Because the app has running costs. We're running on Cloudflare D1, and we're pushing notifications through Firebase, which bridges over to Apple, etc. As my first product, I've tried to be lean where I can, but there are also a number of unknowns in terms of costs, etc.

There are some very good, free alternatives online, and I would never begrudge anyone for selecting an alternative, I just hope that users can see the value proposition in what Dustbound offers.
I chose an approach that offers a plain, low, simple price up front, with no subscription, and no in-app advertisement. I wanted the user experience to be clean and not be marred by association of an ad network, which historically for me has always been a turn off. I wanted Dustbound to have that polish, and I felt I could only do that by offering it at a cost, albeit a low cost.